How to tie your hiking boots

Often neglected, lacing your shoes is essential for safe and comfortable hiking. Let's see how to tie your hiking boots.

It is not enough to choose the right hiking boots, you also need to know how to use them correctly, which includes lacing them properly. Properly laced shoes avoid many discomfort problems, such as chafing if your shoes are too loose or discomfort or pain if they are too tight, and they also ensure good foot and ankle support, which is essential for your safety. Let's take a look at how to tie your hiking boots properly. 

Properly laced hiking boots hug the shape of the foot without exerting any pressure. To do this, start by lacing the bottom part of your boots, adjusting the laces ring by ring, so that the boot fits your instep without crushing it or cutting off your blood circulation. Remember that before anything else, you need to be comfortable in your shoes, so keep them flexible. If you feel that your foot is floating slightly inside the shoe, despite attempts to tighten it, then add an insole to fill the gap.

It is also important to keep your toes free to move around, so that they don't get squashed against the side of the shoe. To do this, you can choose to put on your shoes on a slight incline (heel down, toes up) rather than on flat ground, or you can tap your heel on the ground to keep the heel in the shoe.

To make sure you keep the tension you have acquired, finish lacing the lower part (below the malleolus) by tying a stopper knot. So, at the base of the ankle, before you start lacing the upper part of the shoe which is on the collar. In fact, some shoes have a specially designed locking hook to separate the lower part from the upper part. 

Finally, move on to the upper part of the upper by threading your laces through the hooks provided for this purpose, not from the bottom up but from the top down. Why? This way you create more tension and do not risk losing the tension acquired in the lower part of your shoes, the laces are more difficult to get out of the hooks, and the final knot will not bother you when you go downhill for example.  

Finish lacing your shoes with a surgeon's knot, which is more effective than a double knot and easier to undo at the end of a hike.